Perfect Days (2023)

Hirayama is a simple man. He wakes up early every morning, listens to old songs on cassette tapes, cleans public toilets for a living, takes photographs of nature and reads stories by lamplight. At night, he dreams in black-and-white. Is he lonely, happy, sad or merely content with the little things in life? This movie is mostly contemplative in nature, with lots of lengthy pauses and slice of life moments. It has a calming effect on the viewer, while also suggesting much more going on beneath the surface. 

4 Komorebi out of 5

Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)

Wim Wenders' film is very much an essay in the style of French auteur Chris Marker, so much so that I've no hesitation in recommending it to fans of Marker. It uses one art form (film) to capture another kind of artist (designer) at work, being both a commentary on the image presented and on itself. Like Marker, assumptions follow observations but are never unwelcome.
In focus is Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, a fascinating individual whose sense of ease is the opposite of what I expected.
Yohji's designs help people discover and accentuate their identity. The beauty that's uncovered when a chosen garment and a sense of individualism are combined is a large part of what drives him.
It's not a documentary on the fashion industry, it's a glimpse into a quiet soul who has an intuitive understanding of why he does what he does.

4 kinds of accord out of 5

Chacun son Cinéma (2007)

(Eng: To Each His Own Cinema)

An anthology that contains over thirty short films by as many different directors, commissioned to celebrate six decades of the Cannes Film Festival. Each work is approximately three minutes in length and was supposed to represent the director's "state of mind [...] as inspired by the motion picture theatre." As usual with this kind of thing, I'll put the full list in comments.
My 'Admit One' was for Kitano and Cronenberg, neither of which were essential. The ones that moved me most were Alejandro Iñárritu's 'Anna' and Abbas Kiarostami's 'Where Is My Romeo?', both of which had more emotion than the others combined. Also, I really liked Chen Kaige's 'Zhanxiou Village'.
A lot of them take place inside a theatre with crucial scenes from actual films being projected onscreen, so expect some spoilers.

3 light shows out of 5

Paris, Texas (1984)

A bearded Harry Dean Stanton walks around the desert in an empty haze. Has he found some grade A weed, or something more tragic? The remainder of the film fills in the four-year blank in his mind, very slowly but hauntingly poetic.
The cinematographer (Robby Müller) deserves a large chocolate medal for his work. 147 minutes is perhaps too long, but the last half hour will nail itself to your memory, when Stanton shows the world what it means to be an actor.

4 strums by Ry Cooder out of 5